Next time Katy Perry and Madonna head to the polls to “vote naked,” they can take a selfie with their ballot without running afoul of the law—at least when it comes to the photo.
The First Circuit Court of Appeals struck down a New Hampshire law that barred voters from taking photos of and with their ballots inside the voting booth. The court said the law, which went into effect in 2014, was pure overkill: “like burning down the house to roast the pig.”
According to authorities in New Hampshire, the law was put in place to prevent vote buying, voter intimidation and voter coercion, but the New Hampshire ACLU said the law infringed on free speech rights, noting that it’s not unusual for voters take to social media to document their political leanings.
New Hampshire claimed that sharing your vote on social media is just like showing your ballot to another person in the precinct, illegal since the late 1970s.
The court, like a lower court before it, did not agree. “New Hampshire may not impose such a broad restriction on speech by banning ballot selfies in order to combat an unsubstantiated and hypothetical danger,” First Circuit Judge Sandra Lynch wrote in her opinion. “We repeat the old adage: ‘a picture is worth a thousand words.’”
Other than New Hampshire, 26 states have laws on the books banning ballot selfies. Laws in 14 other states, according to the ACLU, could be used to punish in-booth ballot photographers. Only five states, including California, have exemptions on the books that explicitly allow for social media vote-sharing.
